The Magic of a Pre-Mortem

If you have been working in tech long enough, it’s very likely that you have participated in a post-mortem. Maybe a Production release caused an outage, a priority project went way over budget and timeline, or a deliverable to leadership completely missed the mark. What went wrong? Where did the process break down? What could be done differently next time? Notes are captured (hopefully with action items and owners), and everyone moves on to the next priority.

When planning the next release or project, how can teams ensure those lessons from prior post-mortems are brought into practice? A pre-mortem is an interactive, collaborative way to address this. Before kicking off an engagement, you bring key stakeholders into a room (physical and virtual) and ask them to put themselves at the end of the project and imagine it’s a complete, utter failure. What went wrong? Where did the process break down? What could be done differently next time? By asking these same questions at the beginning of the project, this helps the team to refine their definition of success and suss out risks to be mitigated.

Tips for a Successful Pre-Mortem

• Ensure diverse representation – All departments and practice areas involved in the engagement should have a representative in the session to ensure diversity of ideas and perspectives. Project failure for Technology will look different for Marketing which will look different for Finance.
• Break the ice – Like any workshop, it can be helpful to plan a brief activity at the start of the session to bring folks out of their shell and get the creative juices flowing.
• Make it interactive – Sticky notes on a whiteboard (in a conference room or virtual tool) are recommended. After individual brainstorming, similar risks can be grouped together, and discussion will often spark additional ideas.
• Prioritize – Once brainstorming is complete, discuss the severity and likelihood of each risk to glean priority. This can be done in the same session or in a subsequent meeting.
• Follow through – Add these to your RAID log and start mitigating!